Deep Sound Original · The author | Zu Yang
"The restaurant industry is not easy to do" is no longer a new voice.
Whether it is the uncertainty brought about by the continuous and repeated epidemics, or the catering industry itself has reached the crossroads of refined operation, the cost is high, consumers are becoming more and more picky, and offline business is more difficult.
Last year, many big-name restaurant chains have chosen to close regional stores and reduce prices to "survive with broken arms", and those small and medium-sized catering businesses that have no money to fight and fight alone are struggling on the line of life and death.
Not only the catering industry, but also the common dilemma faced by various life service merchants such as eating, living, traveling, traveling, and entertainment: repeated epidemics, unlimited internal volumes, high costs... All of them make the pain unbearable for merchants.
Finding a new growth card to start a new journey has become the consensus of "scarred" businesses.
Entrepreneurship is struggling
The life service industry has always been a representative of "hard work" and "hard money".
The catering industry has always had the saying of "three highs and one low": high rent, high labor costs, high food prices, and low profit margins. To make a simple calculation: rent, manpower, and food products account for about 70% of the total cost, and after deducting taxes, depreciation of fixed assets and other losses, the profit margin is usually only 5%-10%, which does not include the possibility of price increases from time to time in the upstream supply chain.
Nowadays, to open a chain of fast food stores, the cold start cost is expected to be about 300,000, including franchise fees, rent, equipment, annual management fees, etc., that is to say, in the case of not knowing whether the follow-up is profitable, first do hundreds of thousands of yuan may be prepared to drift.
The main difficulty in the hairdressing and nail industry is that it is difficult to standardize and industrialize, so it is necessary to invest relatively higher labor costs, such as the cost of training in the early stage and the salary of personnel in the later stage. In the hair and nail industry, the flow of people is the main reference standard when choosing a site, but the restrictions of the industry itself determine that it can only do "3 kilometers" business, and it is difficult to expand the scope beyond 3 kilometers.
This means that the hair and nail industry is limited in widely attracting new customers, and can only continue to consume regular customers. For example, hair salons often sell the "membership card" business of hundreds of thousands of yuan, in fact, they want to improve the repurchase rate of regular customers and maintain the operation of the store.
Compared with the "peripheral business" of the catering and hairdressing and nail industry, the wine travel industry is doing the business of "poetry and far away", but the wine travel industry has been hit hard by the impact of the black swan of the epidemic.
Most tourist attractions rely on tickets and people to survive, and the narrowing tourist travel demand directly blocks the revenue source of scenic spots, and many scenic spots also have high expenditures such as manpower, rent and equipment maintenance. Not only that, the long decision-making cycle and the traffic that is difficult to precipitate and convert also raise the difficulty of expanding the voice and obtaining customers in the wine and travel industry.
From the above three industry cases, it can be seen that the plight of life service merchants is mainly divided into three aspects:
At the cost level, the life service industry is facing fixed rent, manpower, marketing and other costs, once affected by the outside world, the income plummets, and the high cost can easily become a straw that crushes the business.
At the product level, although the life service industry is just needed, the homogenization between products is extremely serious, which means that the product has high substitution, and consumers do not need any conversion costs to change the business.
When the substitution of products is high and the conversion cost of consumers is low, it is difficult for merchants to develop a loyal repurchase rate. The profit space of new users is limited, and the repurchase rate is the password for merchants to make long-term profits and survive.
At the marketing level, the traffic delivered by the life service class must be converted into a customer to the store to be considered a successful conversion, which is much larger than the link of pure online conversion of "ordinary consumer goods advertising on social platforms and consumers placing orders in e-commerce", the traffic loss is much larger, and the conversion process is more difficult and more complicated.
Specific to the delivery, on the one hand, the marketing effect is limited, word of mouth is difficult to break the "circle", for example, if a noodle shop is opened in a residential area, even if the reputation is good, it is only "enclosure self-love", it is difficult to convert the residents of the next community into familiar customers; on the other hand, the wide net marketing leads to insufficient traffic accuracy and causes a lot of waste.
"Clearing the land" on fertile soil
Poor will change, change will be general, general will be long. The experience of countless predecessors has also told us that the greater the difficulties, the more unlimited opportunities are hidden. Nowadays, some merchants have seized the opportunity of the times and found the key to breaking the situation.
We have seen that in view of the high cost of store operating, ice cream brand DQ chose to drive store participation, and "everyone collects firewood" to increase overall sales.
During the launch of DQ's new products, the online launch of #ice cream and fried chicken on the Douyin platform was originally matched with the # topic, offline more than 800 stores across the country launched a new product preferential strategy, and invited high-quality talents, vertical talents and regional goods talents to form different matrices to release punch card videos, spread the sound of new products, and finally DQ ushered in 6 months of peak sales, the number of orders exceeded 130,000, and the sales volume of 6 days was more than 3.6 million.
The hair and nail industry often falls into the strange circle of "low repurchase rate", and it is difficult to play a louder volume in marketing, and the hairdressing company Aixiu Beauty Industry and the nail art company UCIRL choose to use the resources of Douyin to regularly target self-broadcast customers, gradually breaking the "3 km" spell.
Half a year after the live broadcast on the Douyin platform, Aixiu Meiye formulated a detailed annual plan for the operation of Douyin life services, including inviting talents to experience the store every month, publicizing the company's products, and ensuring that it was broadcast live for 5-6 hours on the brand's official Douyin account every day, continuing to attract new users for the brand.
"Before, our customers were more residents of the surrounding areas, that is, the big brothers and sisters who lived near the store, but since we started operating Douyin, we have gained some consumer groups outside the surrounding areas, and these people are also younger." Wu Qiong, head of online operations of Aixiu Meiye, said.
Different from the common nail art brand, UGIRL provides a "self-service nail art" service, founder Yao Fa once revealed that initially to try the mentality to choose Douyin, in the home page online group purchase package after the release of a short video, did not expect the effect unexpected, for the company to bring a lot of customers. Now, UGIRL publishes at least one short video a day and occasionally broadcasts live, and in this model, monthly revenue has increased by about 20% compared with before.
Affected by the epidemic, tourists' demand for long-distance travel has declined relatively, and short trips within 2 hours of peripheral tours and high-speed rail have gradually become a popular trend. The Douyin short video and live broadcast make the user's decision-making link for short trips further shortened.
In the face of the problem of passenger flow and income decline caused by the epidemic, the solution that Chengdu Manhua Manor thought of was to cultivate users' hobbies in Douyin Live Cloud Flower Appreciation, and when the epidemic recovered, it could effectively return the scenic spot to the growth track quickly, and the warm-up video and live broadcast released regularly also boosted the POI visits and collections of Manhua Manor.
Located in Beijing Fangshan District children's outdoor parent-child resort complex - Han jian Cuixi Valley Children's World, in the past due to the influence of location factors, the park only has a certain degree of popularity in Fangshan District, this spring, Han Jian Cui Xi Valley Children's World tried to invite a number of local KOLs for live broadcast and short video shooting, only four days in the Douyin life service platform sales exceeded 800,000, the park also won the "Douyin Eat, Drink and Play List" Beijing play list second place.
Whether it is short video or live broadcast, it is to create a "scene-based" experience for tourists, and through interaction with fans, it produces higher stickiness and brings higher transformation to scenic spots.
Catering, hairdressing and nail art, wine and tourism have their own dilemmas, and the key to breaking the situation in different businesses is also different. However, after reviewing the beginning and end of their "popularity", we can find a similar communication path: relying on the Vibrato life service, detonating the brand's voice and sales. And how to make good use of the vibrato life service, the specific can be divided into three steps:
The first step is to settle in the business and operate the position. That is, the merchant registers an account in Douyin, claims the POI store, and shelves preferential products on the home page of the account and the home page of the store, and the integrated structure of the "number store" allows users to plant and pull grass at any time.
The second step is content management. On the Douyin platform, when businesses operate content, they can do it themselves, or they can use the platform's rich talent resources, and they can also use the professional strength of operators to arrange and combine to achieve different effects. In addition, various content marketing tools such as the Douyin Challenge, National Tasks, and Sticker Music can also help merchants present a variety of content and achieve better interaction and conversion with target consumers.
The third step is traffic management. Merchants can use the platform's open screen, information flow, live broadcast red envelopes, search easter eggs and other tools to heat up traffic; they can also choose exclusive customized marketing activities, such as node marketing, new product marketing, anniversary and other brand marketing, to release more voice and resources.
The most important thing in this step is that the Douyin life service business account has established a private domain operation with its own position as the core, and the public domain traffic accumulated from the previous traffic tools and short video live broadcasts will eventually precipitate to the account itself and become the business's own private domain traffic.
The logic of the "human freight yard" is reshaped and the way to break the game is found
Behind the process from finding pain points to solving pain points is a change in the business environment.
On the one hand, the business model has undergone changes from offline stores to content platforms. The local business based on life services has gone through the 1.0 era of attracting offline traffic by "site selection" and "shouting", and the 2.0 era of online traffic with the help of evaluations, lists, and advertisements, and now it has come to a new stage, and everyone can get more decision-making information through a richer form - such as short videos, live broadcasts, and multi-dimensional displays, which can allow users to get more decision-making information. At this stage, the test is not only the product strength of the merchant, but also the content conversion power.
On the other hand, the logic of the human freight yard is reshaped. Conceptually, "goods" are not only commodities, but also diversified content and a full range of consumer experiences; in order, visualization, interactive short videos, live media and available private domain traffic pools have turned the original "people looking for goods" into "goods looking for people" - showing product characteristics with rich content, accurately targeting target groups with interest recommendations, and stimulating conversion.
When the business model and business logic are constantly iteratively upgraded, life service merchants need content platforms such as Douyin to adapt to changes and achieve a breakthrough.
From the perspective of traffic scale, Douyin has 600 million daily active data, and according to CNNIC data, by the end of 2021, the scale of China's mobile Internet is 1.032 billion people, which means that 2/3 of mobile Internet netizens have the habit of opening Douyin every day, covering various ages, genders, city levels, and interest circles - which means that different businesses can find the target consumer groups they want to hit in Douyin.
The daily active traffic pool of 600 million corresponds to the deepening thickness and richer dimension of the content pool. Based on short video and live broadcast channels, the videos produced by various food, travel, leisure and entertainment talents can help consumers plant grass and make decisions in life, paving the way for subsequent transformation and retention.
In the conversion link, Douyin helps life service merchants to create a short link of "what you see is what you get": consumers can efficiently match merchants through the platform's interest recommendation mechanism, accurately lock the store address according to the POI positioning of the merchant's homepage, and the short-link transaction conversion model avoids a large loss of traffic.
Whether it is online promotion, integrated marketing, the ultimate purpose of the business is to do business, both to aggregate traffic, but also to have the back link of the matching and conversion, Douyin life service is meeting the needs of businesses, can cover the short-term sales increase, medium-term brand promotion and long-term growth of the entire process.
Under the repeated epidemic situation, the most common sentence we hear is: a grain of sand of the times is a mountain that falls on the head of an individual.
Whether it is the impact of black swans, or the changes in the business logic of the business environment, the business "difficult to do" has been an irreversible trend, in such an environment, life service businesses should dare to innovate, think, light on the road, will find a new breakthrough.